Helma Kaldewey has provided us with an important addition to the history of popular music as well as cultural politics in East Germany (GDR). She details the often-serpentine development of jazz music and jazz criticism in the GDR over half a century. She argues that jazz music was not always and only viewed as an oppositional musical expression by those in power, as is often assumed, but that state authorities, including the Stasi, frequently and decisively supported jazz and shaped the direction it took. But most importantly, as her book title implies and leaning on Mary Fulbrook's notion of East Germany as a participatory dictatorship, Kaldewey argues that “proponents of jazz helped shape jazz culture in East Germany by directly negotiating with state authority as well as by institutionalizing jazz” (xvi).

In her two opening chapters, the author traces the history of jazz in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany as well as in the Soviet Zone after World War II. During the period between 1919 and 1945, jazz was usually viewed as synonymous with Americanization and either celebrated or decried, depending on diverging generational perspectives or political orientations. Generally embraced by youth for its novelty and vitality, it was roundly rejected by many of the established elites of the Weimar Republic as a threat to wholesome social norms and well-established musical traditions. During the Nazi period, jazz was viewed also through a racial lens and added to the catalogue of degenerate culture as a rejected art genre. The author emphasizes how, in light of these latter developments, it makes sense that the Soviet Union initially embraced jazz as part of its postwar propaganda repertoire, emphasizing its African American folk music roots. This approach was also consistent with the Popular Front ideology of the Communist Party of the United States of America, which had lobbied for civil rights and equality for Black Americans in the 1930s and celebrated jazz as part of this initiative. But as the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s and the United States expanded its cultural presence in West Europe, Stalin and the Soviet authorities turned their back on jazz and denounced it as part of what they perceived as the expansion of a decadent American culture.

In many ways, this brief discussion anticipates a theme that runs like a red thread through Kaldewey's book. Similar to the rapid course reversal of the Soviet Union in relation to jazz music in the immediate postwar period, the position of jazz in East Germany was never firmly established. Rather, what Kaldewey calls “the confusion about jazz” (106) on the part of the SED government in the 1950s proved a rather accurate prediction of the future changing assessment of this art form in the GDR. As subsequent chapters emphasize, jazz music and its accompanying critical theory usually had an ambiguous status, and its official reception depended on the broader cultural and political developments in East Germany. In this respect, jazz was no different than most mass media expressions or art forms in the GDR. After all, the only consistency in East Germany's response, especially to Western cultural influences, was the lack of consistency and repeated reversals between periods of greater tolerance followed by inevitable restrictions in terms of experimentation and freedom allowed to East German artists. In the 1950s, this meant that jazz was at first officially rejected by the SED government, only to be included and elevated into the catalogue of “the people's music” as part of the post-Stalin Thaw.

One of the most intriguing and noteworthy aspects of Kaldewey's study are the oral interviews she conducted with members of the East German jazz scene as well as the inclusion of their recollections and photographs in her book. Konrad Bauer, Karlheinz Drechsel, Bert Noglik, Werner Sellhorn, and many others are prominently discussed. This deeply personal approach enlivens many sections of the study, especially chapter 4, which focuses on the decade after the building of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s, it was the “confinement to GDR territory [that] bound jazz fans closer together, depending on one another to provide access to their beloved music” (146). It also made the GDR jazz scene more dependent on secret networks and illegal deliveries of jazz records by Western friends and contacts. This, in turn, intensified the surveillance of the jazz circles by the Stasi and deepened the on-again, off-again involvement of some of its prominent members, such as Werner Sellhorn, as government informers (Informelle Mitarbeiter, IMs). As in other cultural arenas, IM status allowed Sellhorn special privileges and access to resources as well as greater flexibility, which he translated into personal advantage as well as the elevation of jazz music within GDR culture.

But the greatest advancement for the status of jazz in the GDR in the 1960s occurred in connection to Louis Armstrong's US State Department–sponsored tour of East Germany in 1965. Although it was meant as a goodwill and propaganda tour, the SED partially coopted Armstrong's visit in order to criticize American race relations and discrimination and to simultaneously elevate its view of jazz as the people's music. As Kaldewey demonstrates, this led to a veritable jazz resurgence in the second half of the 1960s, including several jazz festivals and concert series, most notably the long-lived Dixieland Festival in Dresden organized by Karlheinz Drechsler, who worked as Armstrong's host and MC during his 1965 tour of the GDR. This resurgence also allowed additional jazz festivals to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Leipzig and Weimar, which the author discusses in the last two chapters of her book.

Armstrong's visit was important in one other respect: supervised by state authorities, it led to a clearer definition and demarcation of the style of jazz that the GDR sponsored in the last two decades of its existence. Originally referred to as classical jazz, East German critics referred to Armstrong's style of jazz, which they argued was tied to the original roots of African American folk music and expressed primarily a humanist, non-commercial version of jazz. In the 1970s and 1980s, this style was increasingly elevated as the socialist state-sponsored new jazz music, which in its ideal form worked as a “creative collective co-creation” and was supposed to appeal “to a broader spectrum of audiences, [uplift] the intellect, and [help] to forge the socialist self” (208). In the early 1970s especially, when Erich Honecker loosened the reins on cultural restrictions in general, this led both to new concert venues such as the Pleitz Jazz Festival and to an increasing, condoned collaboration between East and West German jazz musicians and producers across the Berlin Wall.

But, like so many innovations of the early Honecker years, this revitalization of the GDR jazz scene would not last. In the 1980s especially, the government tried to centralize the jazz scene even more than before and further elevated its use for political and ideological purposes. Although this produced a few short-lived successes, it ultimately robbed East German jazz musicians and organizers of the last vestiges of their limited freedom and vitality. By the end of the decade, concerts were poorly attended and jazz music produced by East German artists became increasingly unappealing to audiences. Too many restrictions and prescriptions as well as too much state control suffocated the once-thriving scene.

The confusion about jazz in the GDR is a novel addition to the cultural history of the GDR. To be sure, it follows a familiar pattern of liberalizations and restrictions that were an integral part of GDR cultural policies over the state's forty-year existence. But Kaldewey's research is innovative, exploring a diverse range of historical methods and sources, including oral interviews as well as personal photographs. This latter aspect in particular gives her study a personal and intimate quality and sheds important new light on less familiar aspects of cultural life in former East Germany. The book's breadth and detailed analysis of jazz music and criticism within the context of the broader political and social development in the GDR add a fascinating new perspective to the exploration of the inner workings of East Germany's political and cultural life. For all these reasons, Kaldewey's book provides a very important addition to our understanding of the complexity of this era and East German history in general.